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Multimap, which was established in 1996, is among the UK's top 10 visited websites, receiving more than 10 million users each month. Microsoft hopes that the acquisition "will play a significant role in the future growth of our search business". Web search giant Google, Microsoft's arch-rival, provides its own online mapping service, Google Maps. more
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/* Label Cloud Styles
----------------------------------------------- */
#labelCloud {text-align:center;font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
#labelCloud .label-cloud li{display:inline;background-image:none !important;padding:0 5px;margin:0;vertical-align:baseline !important;border:0 !important;}
#labelCloud ul{list-style-type:none;margin:0 auto;padding:0;}
#labelCloud a img{border:0;display:inline;margin:0 0 0 3px;padding:0}
#labelCloud a{text-decoration:none}
#labelCloud a:hover{text-decoration:underline}
#labelCloud li a{}
#labelCloud .label-cloud {}
#labelCloud .label-count {padding-left:0.2em;font-size:9px;color:#000}
#labelCloud .label-cloud li:before{content:"" !important}
All of these settings can be changed but I'll explain them in a moment. The defaults will work for now. Now the widget itself. Scroll down and find the label widget in your sidebar. It should look something like this.<script type='text/javascript'>
// Label Cloud User Variables
var cloudMin = 1;
var maxFontSize = 20;
var maxColor = [0,0,255];
var minFontSize = 10;
var minColor = [0,0,0];
var lcShowCount = false;
</script>
<b:widget id='Label1' locked='false' title='Label Cloud' type='Label'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:title'>
<h2><data:title/></h2>
</b:if>
<div class='widget-content'>
<div id='labelCloud'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
// Don't change anything past this point -----------------
// Cloud function s() ripped from del.icio.us
function s(a,b,i,x){
if(a>b){
var m=(a-b)/Math.log(x),v=a-Math.floor(Math.log(i)*m)
}
else{
var m=(b-a)/Math.log(x),v=Math.floor(Math.log(i)*m+a)
}
return v
}
var c=[];
var labelCount = new Array();
var ts = new Object;
<b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>
var theName = "<data:label.name/>";
ts[theName] = <data:label.count/>;
</b:loop>
for (t in ts){
if (!labelCount[ts[t]]){
labelCount[ts[t]] = new Array(ts[t])
}
}
var ta=cloudMin-1;
tz = labelCount.length - cloudMin;
lc2 = document.getElementById('labelCloud');
ul = document.createElement('ul');
ul.className = 'label-cloud';
for(var t in ts){
if(ts[t] < cloudMin){
continue;
}
for (var i=0;3 > i;i++) {
c[i]=s(minColor[i],maxColor[i],ts[t]-ta,tz)
}
var fs = s(minFontSize,maxFontSize,ts[t]-ta,tz);
li = document.createElement('li');
li.style.fontSize = fs+'px';
li.style.lineHeight = '1';
a = document.createElement('a');
a.title = ts[t]+' Posts in '+t;
a.style.color = 'rgb('+c[0]+','+c[1]+','+c[2]+')';
a.href = '/search/label/'+encodeURIComponent(t);
if (lcShowCount){
span = document.createElement('span');
span.innerHTML = '('+ts[t]+') ';
span.className = 'label-count';
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(t));
li.appendChild(a);
li.appendChild(span);
}
else {
a.appendChild(document.createTextNode(t));
li.appendChild(a);
}
ul.appendChild(li);
abnk = document.createTextNode(' ');
ul.appendChild(abnk);
}
lc2.appendChild(ul);
</script>
<noscript>
<ul>
<b:loop values='data:labels' var='label'>
<li>
<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:label.url'>
<data:label.name/>
<b:else/>
<a expr:href='data:label.url'><data:label.name/></a>
</b:if>
(<data:label.count/>)
</li>
</b:loop>
</ul>
</noscript>
<b:include name='quickedit'/>
</div>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>
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By Sean P. Aune
Blogged with Flock
It’s that time of year again for the major search engines to release their top search queries of the year. Yahoo traditionally goes first, and today’s the day. And once again, people can’t seem to help but type “Britney Spears” into every search box they come across.
The top queries of the year on Yahoo are:
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Six Apart has sold its hosting blogging platform LiveJournal, which it acquired in January 2005, to Moscow-headquarted SUP (pronounced “soup”), the company said this evening. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. SUP previously acquired licensing rights in October 2006 permitting them to manage LiveJournal in Russia, where the platform dominates blogging culture.
“This allows Six Apart to focus on their remaining three brands (Vox, TypePad and MoveableType)” CEO Chris Alden told me this evening. LiveJournal, created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 1999, was the lone service not built in house. “We have very ambitious plans for our remaining brands going forward” he added.
Since the 2005 acquisition, Live Journal has grown from 5 million to over 14 million accounts. But overall unique visitor and page view growth has been static for the last year. In October 2007 Comscore says LiveJournal had 13.8 million worldwide unique visitors generating 475 million page views. That’s up only slightly from the 11.1 million visitors and and 408 million page view per month a year ago.
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Google continues to make forays into the world of images, on several different fronts.
Image recognition in Google searches is taking shape. Although not highly publicized yet, there is a way to search images for certain elements such as faces. For example, if you do an image search for “USA”, you get a slew of maps. If you do the search “usa imgtype=face”, the search does indeed turn up pictures of people.
According to Google’s Sergey Brin, it will be possible for the computer to soon automatically search images for patterns, such as that of an elephant, in a picture.
While identification of physical objects in pictures will go a long way towards helping categorize the trillions of images on the web, there are aspects of classification which are abstract, and subjective. For example, the picture on the left can be categorized as 1. sky, 2. bird or 3. soaring.
A new Google project called Google Image Labeler has popped up for improving the relevance of image search. At any particular time, two random users who have signed up for the experiment, are paired up. Over a period of 2 minutes, both are shown a set of images for which each provides as many labels as they can think of. When the pair has a match, each of them get a certain number of points depending upon how specific the description is.
I tried out the application in guest mode (see the pictures below). Interestingly, each picture starts out with a list of “off-limit” terms which are actually the first ones that would come to mind. The purpose of these might be to look beyond the most obvious categorization. For example, in the map example below, the descriptions “map” or “Australia” were off limits.
While the Image labeler seems like a pretty entertaining project at this point, Google’s objective is to probably use the real human fuzzy network data to refine its automatic image filtering, rather than a simple grand scheme to use free cpus to classify all of the web’s pictures.
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French Internet company Hi-Media, operator of one of Europe’s largest ad networks and micro-payment services, completed its acquisition today of Fotolog. The $90 million deal was first announced last August. Since then, Fotolog has added two million more members for a total of 13 million, and claims 3.9 billion page views a month. Fotolog trails behind MySpace’s PhotoBucket and Yahoo’s Flickr.
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If you need any further proof that Google flat out owns the online advertising space, just look to the right. Both Yahoo and Facebook are using Google Adwords to advertise their competing advertising platforms.
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Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to give publishers the ability to offer contextual advertising as part of their PDF document downloads.
Users upload their PDFs to Yahoo’s ad network and then Yahoo hosts the document for download and serves up contextual advertising in a panel to the right of the given document’s content.
According to CNet, sites participating in the current closed beta include IDG’s InfoWorld, Wired, Pearson’s Education, Meredith Corporation and Reed Elsevier. No word as yet as to when it might be broadly available, although if it is eventually rolled out as part of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) it will be a US residents only service.
On one hand contextual advertising in PDFs probably falls into the “why didn’t they think of that before” category, but on the other hand there’s probably a reason this is a new concept, because I can’t see there being a stampede of people wanting to use the service. It will be interesting to see however whether the ads convert, and it may provide an additional revenue stream for ebook sellers and similar online users and creators who regularly provide PDF downloads to visitors.
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If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.
The program, part of Google Labs, works like this:
This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.
At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.
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In remarks at the Churchill Club, AT&T’s CEO confirmed what most Apple-watchers have been suspecting: a 3G iPhone will come out next year. Sounds like they fixed that battery-drain problem. Hopefully, these things won’t start exploding like those laptops a year ago.
Mike makes fun of me for toting around a Blackberry, but I’d rather wait for the 3G version of the iPhone to come out before thinking about switching. AT&T’s slow-as-molasses EDGE data network cripples the current iPhone (IMHO). The WiFi option for surfing the Web on the iPhone today is a nice backup, but you can’t really count on it for constant mobile connectivity. A 3G iPhone would certainly become yet another Apple lust object/upgrade, but will it be enough to accelerate sales to hit the 10-million mark Steve Jobs set as a goal for next year. It all depends on the price, and you can be sure that isn’t going to be cheap. A guess is $599.
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Microsoft has acquired Seattle based social networking site WebFives.
WebFives was initially founded in 2004 by former Microsoft engineer Mike Toutonghi as Vizrea and offers social networking with a focus of mobile media, including video, music and photos. Users are provided with standard social networking profile pages complete with blogging, and have the option of accessing their sites via computer or via a WAP specific page.
According to The Seattle Times, Toutonghi told WebFives users that the service will stop at the end of the year because of the Microsoft acquisition, making the acquisition a technology buy as opposed to a community buy. Toutonghi went on to encourage users to sign up to MSN Spaces and/or Windows Live for their social networking experience.
Price of the acquisition was not disclosed.
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Google is usually fairly tight lipped about future product releases. But they were surprisingly revealing about upcoming plans for Google Apps at an event in Ann Arbor earlier this week. Blogger Andrew Miller took some great notes from a presentation by Googler Scott Johnston, the VP of Product Development at wiki startup Jotspot prior to their acquisition by Google a little over a year ago.
First, Google Sites, an evolution of Google Page Creator, will launch in 2008. Google Sites will be based on JotSpot collaboration tools and will allow businesses to create intranets, project management tracking, extranets and other custom sites.
We should also expect Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar to soon work offline via Google Gears. This has been widely predicted, but it’s good to see it coming more formally from Google (note that Zoho, a Google Docs competitor, already has offline functionality via Google Gears).
Some of the other stuff is more speculative, but worth the read (pivot tables on Google Spreadsheets? I doubt it).
* Google Sites: Scheduled to be launched sometime next year (2008), Google Sites will expand upon the Google Page Creator already offered within Apps. Based on JotSpot collaboration tools, Sites will allow business to set up intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites based on multi-user collaboration.
* Will users be able to edit docs, spreadsheets and presentation offline? Scott’s answer was yes, and that the Google Gears plugin would handle the offline work. In addition, Google Gears support is in the works for Gmail and Google Calendar.
* What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
* Will Google docs have OCR capabilities for importing .pdfs or other graphical files? Not yet, but perhaps someday. Scott couldn’t comment on the “roadmap” for future enhancements. However, the collaborative Google Sites (based on JotSpot) will allow for upload and storage of any file type.
* Will GrandCentral be integrated into Google Apps? If so, when? Again, Scott didn’t comment on the timing but said they are working on it and it is a “huge priority” for them.
* Will Google Spreadsheets ever have advanced features like pivot tables, macros or offline database integrations? (This was actually my question) Scott said they are constantly trying to find the balance between speed and utility. It will never be a heavy duty analytics program because that would be too heavy and bulky for the average user.
* Will Google Apps support video conferencing in addition to Google Talk and Chat? Scott’s answer, “Not yet”. I got the impression from his body language that it’ll come someday, but nothing more was said.
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Google has released two new features for its RSS reading product, Recommendations and Drag-and-Drop.
The Discovery recommendation feature suggests new sites a user may wish to read based on current subscriptions and (interestingly) browsing history. Google has previously offered feed bundles based on subjects, but this is the first time it has offered customized recommendations in this way.
The drag-and-drop functionality allows users to re-order or move subscribed feeds within a folder or to another folder. This style of functionality isn’t unique, and as Google itself points out, RSS readers such as Bloglines and NewsGator already provide drag-and-drop functionality.
Google thanks a number of interns and ex-interns for the new features, a nice thing to do.
As a Google Reader user I know I’m certainly going to use the drag-and-drop functionality, and I’m even looking at some of the suggested feeds as well, but I’ve got to ask: how is it that we can get drag-and-drop in Reader and not Gmail? Surely Gmail could do with this functionality. Maybe the Gmail team needs some interns as well 
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Facebook members have forced the social networking site to change the way a controversial ad system worked.
More than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition calling on the company to alter or abandon its Beacon advertising technology. Read more here
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MySpace still maintains a clear dominance of the visitor share, with 69% as opposed to Facebook’s 31%. The dominance in advertising is exacerbated by MySpace’s tendency to deliver advertising with a little bit of content to its userbase. The numbers appear crushing to Facebook, in that sense, with roughly 87% going to MySpace and 13% going to Facebook in terms of delivered advertising impressions.
The data was collected in September, so it doesn’t include any new changes to the Facebook or MySpace systems, most notably Facebook’s Beacon or Pages initiatives. Clearly the impact of those will be both difficult to measure and significant, given their infomercial-ish nature.
Most of that content also includes ads. In the run down of the ComScore study, they didn’t specify whether or not they measured non-registered visitors to the MySpace site, but I imagine the passive visitor also contributes significantly to the MySpace bottom line. That’s something Facebook, as of present, can’t claim.
That’s the price of erecting a 20-foot concrete wall around your garden. You may keep the riff-raff out, but it is the riff-raff that pays your bills in the end.
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Blogged with Flock
A Facebook application called Advent Calendar (one of a handful) had put itself up for sale on eBay last week, but hasn’t gotten more than $7,099 by the final bidding time. That wasn’t enough to meet the reserve, and gives a rather dismal outlook to the overall value of Facebook apps. While there has been a lot of interest in Facebook’s platform and the subsequent applications on the investment end, no applications have seemed to fetch a large acquisition price.
This seems to be for several reasons, most of which seem to be associated with the current market. But I don’t really have to state the obvious when it comes to this particular Advent Calendar application that’s been put up for sale–how do you monetize such an application that can only be used for 24 days of the year?
Nevertheless, this is the second company in the past week to seek a buyout in time for the holidays. DivShare has kept the details of its “for sale” status pretty under wraps, but a lot of speculation regarding its selling potential has been swirling around as well. But when it comes to the Advent Calendar application, it’s a rather unique situation, considering the newness of applications, the “market” and the rest of the world joining in on the open bandwagon.
[via allfacebook]Blogged with Flock
coComment has found another way to let you follow your comments across the web. It has two new Facebook applications that will track and display the comments from blogs and websites that you participate in. One app is for individual users, while the other is for publishers. So no matter what your purpose behind comment-tracking, you can share it with friends on Facebook. The good thing about the application designed for individual users is the ability to customize which blogs’ comments display in the app. This of course will also be displayed on your profile, so all your friends can see your comments from across the web. Now, setting up the Facebook apps for coComment is a different story. It’s not so easy if you don’t already have a coComment account, and of course you’ll need to register and install the coComment application prior to starting with your app on Facebook.
So is it worth the trouble? The hope is to find new places to congregate your comments, and get friends more interested in all those smart things you say on other people’s blogs. But I’m actually less inclined to read comments when they’re “floating” around without context. At the very least, I do like the idea of having access to my aggregated comments available on Facebook.
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While very few details have been released about this possible new search setup, one example given is for the search term “mobile phones.” This could return a set of results that offer drop down menus for manufacturer information, brands, technologies, prices and stores. Based on your selections from the drop down menus, your search query will become further tailored to your specific needs.
It’s more of a custom search that borrows some ideas from many that are striving to achieve semantic search, from Grayboxx to Mahalo and Twine. If you look at the basics of what Yahoo is proposing, it appears to be most similar to Grayboxx and Krillion, where users search for certain terms and get a set of results that can be narrowed down for products. Obviously this search setup is more inclined to work better for e-commerce product searches, from a structured level. And it builds on concepts that Yahoo’s been toying with for some time, including the promotion of Yahoo Store search results being included in a pertinent search, or its recent push for an improved Yahoo Local.
So could this in fact help Yahoo differentiate itself from Google, by bringing more value to end users? The idea is useful, especially for those masses of users that aren’t terribly accustomed to online search. But it probably won’t make much of a dent in Google’s dominant market share. Especially after buckling yesterday during Cyber Monday shopping. Ask.com has also been tweaking its search tools in order to offer a broader set of results, giving you song clips and videos that play directly from your query page, and other results that speak towards a structured semantic search as well.
[via macworld]
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Today’s announcement from Fox Interactive Media President Peter Levinsohn includes other changes that MySpace will be making to its social network, including profile privacy settings that let you create multiple profiles so you can “change faces” according to friends, family and business, something that several other social networks like Friendster are considering as well. This was all hinted at with MySpace’s set of rather significant updates that were mentioned a nearly two months ago, taking MySpace in the same direction as so many other social networks out there–towards the path of Facebook.
The other big announcement from Fox Interactive today is in regards to the expansion of its new ad network, which will now incorporate the entire Murdoch online media empire for advertising options to online marketers.[via Reuters]
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Blogged with Flock
British TV networks the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 will launch a new joint online TV on-demand service that will provide a one-stop shop of content from all channels.
The BBC has had ongoing problems with its iPlayer service which faced delays and budgets blowouts, then came under attack for being available to Windows users only.
The significance of the service has been described by the BBC as “historic;” to put the deal in perspective it would be like CBS, ABC, NBC and Fox coming together for a joint portal where all their shows would be available to be viewed on demand, for download (to say an iPod), purchased or rented. Ultimately the biggest winner from the deal will be the British viewer who will have unparalleled access to legal TV content online in the one spot. Here’s hoping that the idea might be taken up in other countries.Blogged with Flock
BitTorrents aren’t your average video-sharing networks. They’re different in their own right, and command a different breed of user. That user is often less concerned with the typical wiles of popular web 2.0 trends, but every once in a while, some interesting mashups come about as a result of the existence of the two in the online world.
PickyPirate has picked up on one such need and has created a mashup that aggregates reviews from Metacritc and matches them up with content you can find on Mininova and The Pirate Bay, and directing you to the healthiest torrent accordingly. Metacritic is an aggregator itself. Part of the CNet family, it gathers reviews from trusted critics across the web. And PickyPirate then passes this aggregated knowledge onto you.Blogged with Flock
As great as this name change is, let’s talk about its new features. One of the biggest new features is the ability to download videos, converting them to pretty much any format–AVI, MP4, 3GP, WMV, FLV, ZIP, etc. This means you can view the videos on your mobile as well. An import option has been added for the integration of your YouTube account, or for other YouTube users that you’d like to follow through iDesktop TV. This imports their playlists or favorites.
iDesktop TV is still sticking to YouTube for gathering all of its content, which makes for a unified experience in dealing with the videos you aggregate on the site (download options, etc.) I don’t think it’s focus on YouTube is necessarily a hindrance in this case. However, as YouTube continues to add features and search options into its own service, the necessity for parasitic aggregators may eventually be minimized.
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Flixster CEO Joe Greenstein dropped us an email late last and let slip with a rather impressive fact: Flixster, the social media movie rating application, has just crossed over one billion movie ratings, having reached the number in less than two years from launching the service.
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Ok, it’s not a big deal, but it’s a holiday, and thus Google replacing a link on their homepage qualifies as news. So, here goes: Google has replaced the “video” link on the classic homepage with the “products” link, formerly known as Froogle. The video link got dumped in the “more” dropdown menu with the other less worthy links.
I could go on about how this means that Google is changing its strategy and focusing on product search, but we all know I’d be wasting your (and my) time. Google Video isn’t all that interesting anymore, they replaced it with something else, and that’s it.Blogged with Flock
In an effort to answer the question “which social network is most reliable?”, the folks of Royal Pingdom measured the uptime of 12 popular social networks - MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, Orkut, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, Xanga, Bebo, Last.fm, Reunion.com, Classmates.com and Yahoo! 360 - over a three month period.
As it turns out, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft’s social network (drink up if you haven’t had any idea that Microsoft has a social network) fared poorly, with 3 hours downtime in the measured period. Yahoo! 360 (drink up again if you also had no idea that Yahoo has a social network) was the best of the bunch with absolutely zero downtime, but it was closely followed by Facebook and MySpace which both had only 10 minutes of downtime.
Overall, the results are quite good, with half of the networks having less than one hour of downtime over the three month period; personally, I’d expect worse, so I was pleasantly surprised to know that our social networks are so reliable.
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“myM is changing the way you think about IM by allowing you to express yourself and connect with your friends in a whole new way.”
Ok, that tells us nothing, but Valleywag claims that the service will be similar to Meebo, meaning that it will let you connect with your IM buddies across several IM platforms: AIM, MSN, Yahoo IM, and Meebo itself. Also, you’ll be able to access Friendster, MySpace, and LiveJournal (Facebook is not mentioned).Blogged with Flock
The government of Syria has made the move to block Facebook inside their borders.
According to sources speaking with Reuters, the official statement from officials is that they fear “Facebook could become a conduit for Israeli penetration of our youth”. Critics of the government say that it is really to cut off access to the outside world. This appears to be but one small symptom of a much larger problem for Syrians as Internet cafes are being ordered to limit their communication options, and there is even an Internet Political Crimes ward at one prison now.Blogged with Flock
Zumobi, formerly known as ZenZui, is getting set to launch its beta version on December 14th.
Aiming to make the mobile web experience more pleasant, Zumobi uses a system of “tiles” to give you a visual representation of the sites you want to visit. The information is pushed to your phone so when you click on a tile you will automatically zoom to the site without waiting for a download. To make things even easier on users, Zumobi users can send their tiles to other users so they end up spreading virally.
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“The encryption with Skype telephone software … creates grave difficulties for us,” said Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany’s Federal Police Office (BKA). Well, the thing about encryption is that it should create problems for those trying to decipher the message. That’s the whole idea. But, the German authorities aren’t really talking to Skype about this; in fact, since using spyware to collect information from a person’s computer is illegal in Germany, this is probably just pressure to legalize this practice.
Skype uses RSA for key negotiation and the Advanced Encryption Standard to encrypt conversations; these are solid standards, widely recognized for their security. However, if you’re willing to put on your tinfoil hat for a moment, you can always consider the possibility that the NSA put backdoors in some of those standards in the first place.Blogged with Flock
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has created a Google Earth map mashup that shows air quality across the nation. Get started here. There’s even a 3-D map overlay that lets you view the level of air pollutants that are coming from specific businesses. You can see this if you tilt your map, and it’s most useful when used with 3D map renderings, complete with business buildings and all. more
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Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.
That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.
We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.
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Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.
That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.
We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.
Blogged with Flock
Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.
That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.
We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.
Blogged with Flock
Microsoft has released developer tools for the creation of optimized Facebook applications on Windows Mobile. See the developer tools here. The good thing about these tools is the integration with pretty much all the Windows Mobile applications themselves, so you’ll be able to let your Facebook apps take advantage of mobile media-sharing, contacts synchronization, and Outlook integration.
That makes it easier on the consumer end for the real-life utilization of certain applications found on Facebook. Either way, Facebook apps can ow be better optimized for use on Windows Mobile, but the benefit of this set of APIs is the option for a deeper integration.
We can expect to see similar tools for developers for Google’s own mobile offerings, with OpenSocial integration for the applications that will be made available on Google’s mobile platform. You may also recall that Facebook, which now has APIs for building mobile applications, has also been optimized for Blackberry use, continuing the spurred innovation we saw come about earlier this year with the release of the iPhone.
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New startup Mixx, which went in to private beta just two months ago, may be finding itself with the right product at the right time. Digg users, including top contributors, are showing an increasing amount of frustration with the Digg community, and many are leaving. Conspiracy theories that Digg auto buries stories with certain topics or linking to certain sites only compounds the problem.
Some users eventually go to Reddit, Propeller or any of a number of other Digg-like sites. But a disproportionate amount of them seem to be heading to Mixx, and writing about their choice.
SEOSC gives Mixx a thumbs up and says “I have already had quite a lot of success with getting my submissions voted on, this may be partly due to the fact that many of my digg friends have joined the site.”
Vandelay Design says “Unlike 99% of the other Digg clones, I think Mixx has a real chance for success…Mixx has a much more positive audience than Digg. It always amazes me that even the most popular and highest quality articles can get so many negative and unnecessarily degrading comments on Digg. So far the users of Mixx have proven to be quite a bit more pleasant, something that I know will be welcomed by most users.”
Finally, JD Rucker notes that a lot of top Digg users are at least experimenting with Mixx. And he mentions specifically that Greg Davies left Digg for Mixx.
Mixx users have even set up a category in their forums called Digg Refugees for users to discuss the phenomenon and spread conspiracy theories.
Compete shows traffic rising dramatically since launch, without the usual drop off that occurs after the initial press about a site dies down. It’s still a blip compared to Digg, the fact that early adopters are leaving Digg and quite vocally telling the world about it, Mixx may be a startup to keep an eye on.
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